That Stubborn Yankee

by Carla Neggers

  Even with her eyes shut tight, tears streamed down her face. It had been so very long since her body had felt such yearning, such an exquisite ache.

  Harlan Rockwood had always been real, never a simple fantasy.

  His mouth descended lower, moved down her throat onto her breasts, licking;, nipping, moving lower yet, until she felt the heat of his tongue between her legs. She cried out, not giving a damn who heard.

  His tongue probed deeper and deeper. Beth realized her hips were swaying in rhythm. His mouth moved up her soaked abdomen to her breasts. He swept his arms around her waist and pulled her hips toward him.

  Her pelvis touched him, and she finally opened her eyes. No apparition. No fantasy. He was here with her, a tougher man than she remembered, filled with pain and secrets that hovered behind his blackened eyes.

  He whispered her name gently as he thrust into her, pulling her up and onto him as he moaned for her again and again. Ribs and bruises and all, he thrust harder, wildly, taking her with a hunger she had never experienced with him before. When the explosion came, it rocked them both, shattered them both. Nothing would ever be the same again.

  Still, he tried reaching for the Chevrolet keys when it was over.

  “Don’t even think about it,” she told him, breathless.

  He left as silently as he’d come.

  Chapter Five

  When she returned to the darkened cabin, Beth wondered if she’d imagined the whole thing after all. She spotted Harlan through the screen door, sitting on the front steps in his shorts, an aspirin bottle and drink at his side. She poured herself a glass of iced tea and joined him.

  At the squeak of the door, he turned and patted the porch floor beside him. “Have a seat.”

  To be on the safe side, she sank onto a wicker rocker. He scooted around so that he was facing her, his back pushed against the railing, his knees up. He looked his old, languid self. Dressed in shorts and a sleeveless top, Beth rocked steadily and sipped her tea. She waited for him to initiate a conversation. If he started to talk about what had happened in the shower, she could always change the subject. She needed to find out what he was thinking about. Did he intend to elbow her back to Vermont or give her the explanation she deserved?

  He drank some of his bourbon and picked up his aspirin bottle, clutching it in one hand like a baseball. His gaze was focused on the label. Beth saw he wasn’t reading it. He was avoiding her eyes. “Beth—you can’t stay.” His voice was tight, his words were clipped. “It’s against my better judgment for you even to spend the night. There’s no other choice, but you’re out of here in the morning.”

  Since she’d thrown him out of her house, Beth had no grounds for complaining about him throwing her out of his cabin. She rocked harder.

  “I’ll see that your car gets back to you. I was a jerk for stealing it, but I felt so damned desperate“ His voice faded, and he released the aspirin bottle. “Maybe our being here together one last time was meant to be.”

  “Maybe.” She stopped her rocking. “Look, Harlan, I never said I wanted to stay, and I certainly don’t want to interfere in your affairs. I just want some idea of what the hell’s going on.”

  He sighed. “You have all the ideas you’re going to get. I shouldn’t have gone to Vermont. I wasn’t thinking straight. But that mistake ends here, now, tonight.”

  Undeterred, Beth asked, “Who beat you up?”

  “Give it up, Beth.”

  “I figure it must have been at least two men. One to hold you and one to bash your face in.”

  Impatiently he ran one hand through the damp ends of his hair. It was a miracle he hadn’t punctured a lung in the shower. She supposed his ribs weren’t cracked, after all.

  “I also figure you didn’t accidentally run into them,” she said. “Were they hired goons?”

  He leaned back and silently stared up at the sky in obvious exasperation.

  Beth resumed her slow rocking. “It stands to reason they were. They must have nailed you somewhere up north, otherwise you’d never have thought of coming to Mill Brook, never mind have made it. So were they trying to make you do something, stop you from doing something, or both?”

  “Don’t make assumptions, Beth.”

  Something about his tone conjured up his past escapades. She remembered what an idealist he’d been. “So, Harlan, who put you on your white horse this time and told you to ride?”

  He scowled at her. “I’m just be doing what I feel is right.”

  “The Rockwood sense of duty. Haven’t you ever heard of the police?”

  His expression hardened. “The police are a dead end for now.”

  “Meaning there’s insufficient evidence for arresting whoever hired those thugs who beat you up, to keep you, presumably, from scrounging around on your white horse.”

  “Stop.” Despite his unwillingness to tell her a thing, there was a smile in his eyes. He climbed to his feet, walked toward her and took her hands into his. “Don’t speculate, Beth. It won’t do you any good. If nothing else, you’ll end up imagining a worse mess for me than I’m already in.”

  “Then talk to me.”

  He pulled her to her feet. “Look at me, Beth.” He moved closer, so she could see the slowly healing cuts and bruises on his ravaged face. There were dark, dark circles under his eyes. He didn’t look as boyish or as idealistic as she remembered. “You’ll head home in the morning.”

  “Is that an order?”

  “A strong suggestion.” He let her hands drop, brushed one cheek. “You’re a special woman to me, Beth. You always will be. Now—you can have the bed. I’ll sleep out here on the screened end of the porch.”

  “You don’t have to. I mean, there’s a couch....”

  He smiled. “Too close to the bed. I tried that once. You’ll have the bed, but it’ll be cooler out here. A fair trade-off. Goodnight, Beth.”

  He wasn’t going to budge. He didn’t owe her an explanation. She had to admit that much. She started inside, but stopped at the door and looked back at him, standing in the shadows. “Harlan—no regrets, okay?”

  He nodded. “Okay.”

  “Be careful and sleep well.”

  Inside, she listened to the crickets as she pulled the quilts off the brass bed, planning to sleep under a sheet in the humid heat. All the windows were opened. If Harlan tried anything in the night, she’d hear him.

  Through the screen door he drawled, “Uh... Beth, there could be just one regret in all this.”

  She whirled around, intensely aware of his silhouette against the night. “What?”

  “The silver lining is that you can’t drive two cars north, so it’s lucky you borrowed Julian’s Rover. You can drive it back.”

  She hadn’t considered the logistics of getting two Vermont vehicles back north. “What about the Chevy?”

  “It can’t make the trip.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I all but had to push it the last hundred miles. Beth, the Bel Air’s a museum piece.”

  He’d always called her Chevy “the Bel Air,” as if it made it something it wasn’t. Either that, or he’d called it “that bomb of yours “

  “What’s wrong with it?” she asked.

  He came through the door, “It won’t run.”

  “It’s been refurbished.” She sat on the edge of the bed. “A tune-up and an oil change and it’ll be fine.”

  “I just put over a thousand hard miles on it. How long can a car last?”

  “You’d better hope this one lasts several more thousand miles or what those creeps did to you will pale next to what I’ll do.”

  “Beth, the Bel Air’s a goner.”

  He clearly relished his words. She snorted, “Now who’s lacking sympathy?”

  “For a car? I’m standing here with cracked ribs and enough cuts and bruises to put most men in the hospital, and you’re fretting about your car.”

  “My car has been in my life a lot longer than you have. If you c
an do what you just did in the shower, you’re damned well on the mend.”

  He grinned at her, very sexily. “What I did in the shower, Beth? Seems to me you were a willing partner.”

  “I never did act normal in this place.”

  He sauntered out, as if he’d enjoyed telling her about her car, and had known it’d get her blood boiling. Was he just trying to divert her from figuring out what he was up to?

  She sprang up and locked the door behind him, not that it made any difference. He could come through a window if he had a mind to. And the bathroom was inconveniently outside.

  Still, there was nothing quite like flipping a lock to tell a man to go to hell.

  After an uncomfortable night on a wicker couch too short for him, Harlan awoke early and sore. As he awkwardly got to his feet, he smelled coffee brewing, country ham frying, and heard Beth humming.

  It was a clear, warm, gorgeous morning in Coffee County. A day to go fishing and sit on the porch. He might have done just that, had it not been for one Elizabeth Stiles and his own sense of duty.

  Wearing only his khaki shorts, he headed inside. Beth gave him a cheerfully suspicious smile from the stove, where she had two skillets going. “Good morning,” she said, her blue eyes gleaming.

  “Morning. What’s that red stuff?”

  “Grilled tomatoes.”

  “Fried green tomatoes I get.”

  “You’ll love them.”

  He didn’t argue. She asked him to make toast. He complied, wondering what she was up to. “Glad to be leaving?’’

  “In my own way. I did a lot of thinking last night— not much sleeping, I’m afraid. Anyway, I realize I must be giving you the wrong impression. I didn’t follow you because I want to interfere with your life or even really care what you’re doing.”

  He set the pine table next to the window, with its view of the stream. “You wanted your car back.”

  “Well, yes, of course. But it’s more than that. Let’s just call it intellectual curiosity. I: I hurled myself back into your life after nine years, wouldn’t you want to know why?”

  “I would. In fact, I do.”

  “Do?” She looked momentarily startled. “Oh, Char’s horse. All her idea, I’m afraid. I hit the ceiling when I found out she’d hooked up with you.”

  He filled two mugs with coffee. “You had nothing to do with it?”

  “No. There’s nothing nice, quiet and normal about you, Harlan, even if I’m the only person who knows it. I’ve always been able to see through that pristine Rockwood reputation of yours.”

  “But you knew Char had gone to Nashville instead of Lexington to make her fortune in horses. Weren’t you even suspicious?”

  “What Char did was none of my business.”

  “You had a tidy sum invested with her. I think you suspected we were in a deal together, but didn’t want to know.”

  “Think what you want to think,” she said loftily, dumping her fried tomatoes into a bowl, then arranging the slices of country ham on a plate. “Oh, I soaked the ham in water to remove some of the salt.”

  Harlan didn’t know whether to thank her or gag. He brought the mugs and toast to the table, she, the ham and tomatoes, and they sat down opposite one another in the same chairs they’d used a decade ago. It might have been cozy, but wasn’t. Harlan was too conscious of the bad night he’d passed, of his bruised body and how it had gotten that way, of everything the complex woman across from him had meant to him and still did.

  “You’re leaving after breakfast, I take it,” he said, making his tone as conversational as possible. Elizabeth Stiles wasn’t the sort of person easily ordered about.

  She cut into her slice of ham. “I just got here.”

  Her comment was more a statement of fact than one of intent. She was trying to get him to say more than he should. Trying the grilled tomatoes, which tasted mushy and rotten to him, he studied her. Her hair was sticking out everywhere, and she had dark, puffy circles under her eyes. She wasn’t twenty anymore and had her own way of living, very different from his.

  She sliced another bit of ham. He noticed the black grease in her cuticles. He glanced over at the sink and saw a cloth that looked suspiciously like one of the pricy, Belgian cotton towels he had ordered from Williams-Sonoma.

  “You had a look at the Bel Air?” he asked, his tone neutral.

  “Not ‘the’ Bel Air, my Bel Air. Yes, I had a look. There’s nothing wrong with it. It isn’t used to long distances,” she said testily.

  Harlan took no offense. She had a perfect right to be testy. He had disrupted the stability of her life and now threatened to leave her with a wrecked car and no answers. In her place, he would have been twice as miserable.

  He said with equanimity, “No one knows that bomb of yours better than you do.”

  It was true. The Bel Air had been her off-to-college present to herself. It had served her well, largely due to her meticulous care. Harlan had heard her creep out of the cabin after dawn and assumed she’d had to take a look at her car. Without proper equipment she could only give it a cursory inspection. If she’d looked for wear and tear after the long journey south, he’d bet she hadn’t looked for evidence of sabotage. In fact, he was betting on it. He’d dragged Beth Stiles as far as he was going to into the fetid swamp of his affairs. Now he was going to push her out, even if it had to be the hard way. It was a question of doing what had to be done. Not that Beth would share his view.

  “It’ll make it back to Vermont fine,” she said.

  “Good. Then take it, and I’ll see to it Julian gets his Land Rover back.”

  She stirred her coffee very slowly, her intense gaze riveted on him. “It’s not that simple.”

  He could feel his expression harden. “Yes, it is that simple.”

  “I want to know what you were doing up north.” She set her spoon down, too gently for it not to have been a conscious effort. “I feel I have a right to know.”

  “Maybe you do, and maybe your being in Tennessee is my just desserts for having been a damned fool in coming to Mill Brook. This is as far as it goes, Beth. Go home.”

  He got up from the table, his breakfast unfinished, and headed outside to the spot under the oak where he’d parked the Bel Air. He moved slowly and clumsily because he hurt like hell, still paying for the downright lunacy that had sent him into her shower.

  “Harlan Rockwood.” Her voice was cool and stubborn as she followed him. “I didn’t drive a thousand miles for you to shoo me off. I’m not trying to be unreasonable. The fact is, I intend to stick to you like a bee on a rosebud until you tell me what’s going on.”

  “Potato beetle,” he said. He saw the faint sheen of perspiration on her upper lip and the effects of the humidity on her wild hair, and he knew—promised himself—that he would make love to her again one day. Not today. But soon.

  She frowned. “What?”

  “A potato beetle is a bigger pest to a rosebud than a bee.”

  “I’d rather be a bee, thank you. It was a bad analogy. You’re no rose. Now quit trying to distract me. Harlan, what are you doing?”

  “Sticking my hand in your pocket.” He could have lingered there, next to the warmth of her skin, but didn’t. Instead he withdrew the keys to the Bel Air.

  She gave him her deadliest look, one that would have stopped anyone else cold. One didn’t ordinarily trifle with a woman who knew her chainsaws. “Don’t you dare try to run off on me. I’ll jump in the Rover and be on your tail before you’re out to the main road.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.” He left the door open as he slid behind the wheel and stuck the key into the ignition. ‘‘You are.”

  ‘‘You don’t tell me what to do, Harlan Rockwood.”

  “All right, I won’t. I’ll tell you what I’ll do if you don’t get in this car of yours and head home. I figure I have three choices. One, I call your brothers and have them come fetch you.”

  She sniffed. “I am not a thirteen-year-ol
d runaway.”

  “No, but how do you think Julian feels about you sneaking off in the dead of night with his Land Rover?”

  Her look grew even deadlier. “Don’t come between me and my brothers.”

  “If I give them the word, they’ll be down here in a flash, with a straitjacket, if need be. I don’t have the same history with them as I do with you. They know when it’s time to back off.”

  She said nothing, but he could see the doubt in her eyes, behind the anger. He climbed out of the car. “Or, two, I call a certain local law enforcement official I know who hasn’t reconciled himself to the defeat of the confederacy. Imagine what he’d do if I told him I had me a Yankee trespasser.”

  “I am not amused.”

  “Or, three...” He backed her against the side of the car and placed his hands on the hood, pinning her between his arms. “Three, we lock ourselves in my cabin and make love until I really do puncture a lung, or you realize the only option you have is to give up. I’m sorry I involved you, Beth, but I don’t owe you anything, except maybe flowers when you have to bury your Bel Air.”

  Her eyebrows drew together as she examined him, and he knew he was winning—or at least penetrating that Yankee will of hers.

  She slid under his arm and took a couple of steps out of his reach. “What you’re saying is that you used me.”

  “That’s a harsh view. I look upon it as having taken refuge with an old friend in an hour of profound need. A mistake, perhaps, not a deliberate act of cruelty.” He found himself smiling as he spoke. “A rerun of one of our old arguments, isn’t it? I never mean to hurt you, but always do.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself. I’m not hurt, Harlan. I’d have to care about you a lot more than I do for you to be able to hurt me.”

  Her old defense—I don’t care, so how can I be hurt? He resisted the temptation to touch her, to hold her. “Then why do you want to know what kind of mess I’m in, if you don’t care?”